Submerged

He couldn't breathe. His throat and mouth were full of water and it flooded back into his lungs even as he tried to gasp.

"Sonic!" Sonic didn't know who was shouting. He didn't care. He was sure he was dying, then why couldn't it just be quick and simple? Instead, something hard smashed against his back with such force that he thought it would break his ribs and spine. The pain and the water almost did it; Sonic almost slipped back into unconsciousness. It would have been mercy.

A mercy he clearly wasn't granted, just a second later the same hard strike impacted his back again and this time it forced a gush of water out both his mouth and nostrils. The sensation let tears flow freely out of the corners of Sonic's tightly closed eyes.

"Come on…Breathe, will ya! Damnit, Sonic!" Why couldn't they just shut up and let him suffocate peacefully? Sonic felt as if he was shaken, then the flat and solid as stone thing was hammering rapidly against his back, though thankfully not as hard as before. Another flood of water shot up Sonic's throat and he coughed and retched and gasped for air in between. It hurt, but when it finally began to cease after what felt like a dreadful eternity, he wasn't so sure if he was really dying anymore. Slowly he was regaining some feeling for his body. His lungs burned, right now all muscles ached, he was cold and he was shaking all over.

"It's okay, hey…" What he was beginning to think could be a hand was still pounding his back, although it gradually turned into an almost gentle patting. Sonic coughed up another bit of water. "Yeah, that's right, get it all out," the voice encouraged him, iit was beginning to sound vaguely familiar to his hazy brain and ears one of which still seemed to be full of water. He could feel the warm body that had to belong to the voice, the hand patting his back, his chest lying against what had to be a leg and there was another hand on his shoulders.

Although hardly any water came up anymore, it took minutes until Sonic could stop coughing. Feeling faint and exhausted he was by now glad for the assistance when the hands gently turned him around, held him half upright for a moment, then he was leaned with his back against a cool wall. One hand remained on his shoulder, steadying him, the other wiped water off his brow and gave his cheek a light slap. "Sonic. Sonic?! Sonic!"

In spite of feeling like he really wanted to pass out again, Sonic dragged his eyes open. Everything swam before them and he had to blink a couple of times until he had cleared the tears and found himself looking into a pair of dark violet eyes under a furrowed brow, the red fur on it dripping wet. It took Sonic several seconds until he'd pushed past the daze and found a name to connect to the face. "Knux…?"

The echidna sighed with a small shake of his head that let the water from his brow drop onto his nose. "Thank Chaos, Sonic… What did you think you were doing, trying to die on me like that?"

Sonic didn't answer. After the few seconds it took for Knuckles' words to get past the thick syrup in his mind and make sense, he didn't know what to say.

But Knuckles didn't seem to want an answer right now anyway. He brushed a hand through his soaked dreadlocks, pushing them back over his shoulders, then he reached for Sonic' arm and his fingers slipped under the cuff of Sonic's right glove. Feeling oddly detached from the whole situation, the hedgehog realized Knuckles wasn't wearing a glove on this hand. Shiny with water still clinging to them, the spines on his knuckles looked all the more sharp and wicked. Not like a hedgehog's spines, or like Knuckles' very similar head quills. Now that he looked at them, it seemed weird he'd survived being punched with that clawed fist as often as he had.

"Sonic? You still with me?" Knuckles' other hand, still holding his shoulder, gave him a light shake.

The blue hedgehog forced himself to nod. Nodding made his head spin... For a moment, he just watched Knuckles again. Only now he figured he was trying to feel his pulse. After a few more seconds the echidna let go off his wrist and laid his hand on Sonic's chest. "Can you take a slow, deep breath for me?"

Sonic complied without bothering to wonder about the why. His chest still hurt a little, but it felt good to breathe. Alive.

Knuckles' hand remained on his chest for a while, apparently the echidna seemed to find his breathing strangely interesting. Sonic thought he should mind the proximity, but Knuckles' hand felt almost warm to his chilled skin and in a way the touch was grounding. Something else to focus on but the dizziness and the water and the dread still pulsing in his veins.

"Does it hurt?", Knuckles asked, watching his every exhale, brow still furrowed and eyes tight at the corners.

"Not much now, really," Sonic replied slowly, still feeling muddled and distant. "But I've got water in my ear..." It made the world seem all the more muffled.

The echidna looked taken aback. "Oh," he said, seeming at a loss for words. "I… guess it'll come out eventually," he added then, as an afterthought, as if he had figured he should be saying something.

Sonic tried to sit a little more upright against the wall in his back. Gradually the haze in his head was beginning to lift and he noticed he had stopped shaking so much. "What happened?", he asked. It seemed the thing to say to him now.

Knuckles looked at him seriously, but he let go of him. "I was going to ask you. My way turned out a dead end, so I came to follow you. When I opened the third door, a high wave came flooding in. I managed to swim into the big round room that was behind the door after the part of the corridor had been flooded and the current ceased. The room was two thirds underwater already; it seemed to come through one of the doors that stood open." He tucked off his second glove, gathered up the first from where it lay on the floor to the side, wrung them both out and proceeded pulling them back on before giving Sonic another long look. "I almost didn't find you. You're lucky your shoes are red; in a room with blue walls and blue water you don't really see a blue hedgehog trying to drown himself."

Sonic didn't say anything. His head still felt empty, the knot of dread was still tight in his stomach and he failed to come up with something remotely sensible to say to Knuckles.

"How'd you get the whole room underwater?", the echidna asked, seeming calmer than before. For a moment Sonic envied the calm, even if Knuckles was probably faking it.

"I…" He blinked slowly. "I… opened a door, I think." Even dazed as he was he found it a good idea not to tell Knuckles that it had been labeled as 'restricted' and 'trespassing prohibited'. "And then there was all this water and…" He shuddered. He didn't want to go through it again and relive it. It seemed fairly obvious what happened then.

Apparently Knuckles thought so too, because he didn't push any further. "I've got us out through a door to a higher level on a balcony-like thing that was still above the water," he said instead. He glanced to the left. "So far the door holds close… Whoever built this place really thought about the sealing in case of something like that…"

Sonic just nodded numbly and shivered again. He was cold.

Knuckles was looking at him again with that strange look out of dark eyes. "You know, for a moment I thought I was too late."

"I thought so too," Sonic admitted quietly. "I'm really glad you weren't. Thanks…"

A crooked expression slipped over Knuckles' face. It was better than a grimace, but it didn't make it to being a smile either. "I'd say I'd do it again, but I'd prefer not to have to."

"Yeah." Sonic nodded. Nodding was beginning to be less nauseating. "Same here."

Knuckles' eyes flashed back towards the door. "Do you think you can walk for just a bit? I'd like to get a few more doors between us and the ocean."

"I told you underwater buildings suck, didn't I?" Sonic tried a smile of his own but it wouldn't quite turn out right.

"You did. I'll really consider listening next time." Knuckles carefully helped him to his feet and there was a flash of concern on his face as he slung Sonic's arm over his shoulders to support him.

Still rather dizzy, Sonic didn't speak while they walked past three more sealing doors and ended up in another pretty large room, through this one wasn't round and not as high as the others. Five doors led to probably more rooms and corridors.

Knuckles made Sonic sit down in a corner again and worriedly looked at him for a moment. Then he stood upright, his long quills still dripping water to the floor and his red fur clinging to his body. "I'll go check out a little where these doors can get us. I'll try to get some bearings in here and find out where to go. You just take a few minutes, rest up a little, okay?"

Sonic nodded and let his head fall back against the wall, his wet quills bending slightly under the weight. He closed his eyes. A few minutes sounded awesome.


A few minutes turned into more than an hour. The tightness of fear and panic gradually faded from Sonic's stomach during the first minutes of leaning in the corner. The dizziness followed after another few minutes. He could breathe properly again, but after the most immediate dread had gone and he didn't hurt anymore, a numbing grogginess fell over him.

Sonic wasn't a stranger to the feeling. He'd been lying around like that in several water zones before, tired and cold and waterlogged after almost drowning. He knew it would lift after a while. Truth be told, he almost enjoyed it. The tired stupor was much better than the utter terror before.

Dazedly he lay against the wall, watching Knuckles disappear through one door, then he just stared into the empty room before him, then Knuckles came back after a while just to leave through another door. The echidna didn't bother Sonic and after a while the hedgehog drifted into sleep.

When he woke up he was still leaning in the corner, his head resting against the wall to his right. His fur and quills were only damp anymore and he didn't feel as cold as he used to. In fact, he felt pretty normal again. Only his clothing was still really wet and his left ear still seemed to be full of water.

Opening his eyes, Sonic spotted Knuckles sitting cross-legged about a meter away from him. One of the echidna's shoes lay on the floor, while he was holding the other one up in front of his face, gazing into it with a frown on his face and shaking it a little.

A grin darted over Sonic's face. Something about his friend looked pretty comical right now. "What are you doing?", he asked, sitting upright and reaching for his ear, twisting it a little and drilling a finger into it.

Knuckles put his shoe down and actually genuinely smiled at him. "Hey, you're awake!"

"Yup." Sonic smiled back, in spite of his ear refusing to empty of the water. He laid his head to the side, turned the ear with one hand while softly knocking against the other side of his head with the other. Finally there was a small "plop" sound and he could hear properly again. "Ah, better…" He drilled his finger into the ear again, trying to remove the water completely.

Knuckles was eying him weirdly. "Are you feeling better?"

Sonic nodded. "A lot. I think I'm okay."

The red echidna smiled faintly. "You fell asleep after a while and I thought it'd be the best I just left you to it."

"Thanks. There's not much a nap can't make better." He grinned, following Knuckles' example and beginning to take off his shoes, then his socks and gloves as well. Trying to press the water out of a glove, he shot a glance at Knuckles again. "So, what'd I miss?"

"Not that much. Two of the ways we could take from here are impassable, they both end at doors that won't open at all and I wasn't too eager to try and break through them. There's another that leads to a pretty big kind of storage room full of containers and stuff. I wasted twenty minutes trying to see if there was a way out through it just to find none." Knuckles shrugged, then started knocking his flat hand against his shoe's sole. "The two other ways each are quite long and seem to go on. I tried each for a bit, but I think we'll just have to take our chances with one of them."

Sonic switched over to his second glove. "How much time did we lose?"

Apparently satisfied with the result of his knocking technique, Knuckles pulled his shoe back on his foot and picked up the second one. "An hour, I think. But we didn't know where we were going even before…"

Somehow Sonic had the odd feeling Knuckles had said that to make him feel better about it, although that wasn't much like him. "You think Metal is still in this laboratory room you found the Master Emerald in last time?"

Knuckles shrugged while still holding his shoe. "I've got no idea. Last time, there wasn't even anyone there."

Pulling back on his gloves, Sonic gave up trying to get the remaining dampness out of his sneakers rather quickly. "Tails is here. I know it."

For a moment Knuckles looked at him warily, then he shrugged and put on his second shoe. "We'll just have to find him."

"We will, Knux. We will." Sonic slipped his sneakers back on.

Knuckles stood up in a smooth movement and held out his hand at the hedgehog. Sonic took hold and Knuckles pulled him to his feet, looking firmly into his eyes. "Then we better hurry."

Sonic nodded. "If Tails finds out we argued on the way to rescue him and that I took a nap here, he'll be mad at us…"

Knuckles suddenly grinned in spite of everything that had happened. "Wait until I tell him what you did to his plane…"

Sonic groaned. "Yeah… We better find him quickly and hope he's happy enough to see us to forgive us."

Knuckles nodded. "Let's hurry, then."

Like several times before, the two continued into another blank corridor and past more large steel doors. But now, they ran side-by-side peacefully and no more arguments started. Somehow, without saying so, both were glad the other one was still there to run with them.


For a while as they continued on in silence. Sonic was totally sure they had gotten lost. Every room they got into, be it the corridor-like, long ones, the rectangular rooms or the high, round domes looked exactly like on they'd been in before, and like those they'd seen on their first trip here. Secretly Sonic wondered how many exits the base might have, after all they had apparently blocked the way back to where they'd come from. They needed to find another way out when they found Tails.

If they found him. Sonic was uncomfortably aware of the fact neither Knuckles nor he himself had any idea about the layout of the place, how big it was, let alone where in the giant underwater building they were, had been before and were headed right now.

"Can you still feel that chaos field?", the blue hedgehog asked. It might as well be their only guidance. Last time, they had followed Knuckles' Master Emerald sense. It would make navigating this place a lot easier if they had a beacon like that again.

"Yes." Knuckles shot him a brief look. "It's getting stronger."

Sonic smiled a little at that. "So, that means we're getting closer."

Knuckles shrugged vaguely. "I don't know."

"You don't know? But I thought…" Sonic waved a hand. "I thought you track down the Master Emerald, or the Chaos Emeralds, or a piece of the Master Emerald? Isn't that the same?"

The guardian's head moved in a way Sonic could neither place entirely as a shake, nor as a nod. "It's not that simple, Sonic! I'm not a walking, talking Chaos compass, okay?!"

"Hey, chill it, will ya?!" Sonic drew a deep breath, brushing down his spines with his flat hand. "I just thought you could maybe, you know, know the vague direction? 'Cause that'd really help us."

Knuckles sighed. "As I said, it's not that simple, Sonic. You don't understand."

Sonic tilted his head. "Explain it, then. Maybe I'll get it."

For a second Knuckles looked ready to openly declare his doubts, but then he apparently decided against it. "Fine. You see, the Master Emerald, or its shards when they scattered, or also a Chaos Emerald… They have a… somewhat… logical energy field. It gets stronger the closer you get, but not in a constant way, not like the heat increases the closer you get to a fire. It's almost random; a chaos field can be the same strength over a large space and suddenly get stronger by a lot within less than a meter. That makes it hard tracking down the source, you know?"

Sonic nodded. "I guess I get it so far, yeah."

The Emerald guardian almost seemed surprised about that. "Okay… Good. Now the problem with this chaos field here is… it doesn't behave like any other chaos field I know. From the sort of energy… I would almost say it's like the Master Emerald. But from the way it pulses and how the fluxes and waves come and ebb… it's very much like a Chaos Emerald."

Sonic frowned. "So… you think it's some weird kind of hybrid or what?"

Knuckles' eyes snapped wide open at the idea, and he suddenly looked afraid to Sonic. "I don't know. But I don't like it."

"Hmm." The corridor they'd been walking through ended at another door that opened as soon as Sonic activated the corresponding switch. When the hedgehog stepped into the round, big room that followed, a sensation like a shiver ran down his back and the tips of his fingers tingled. It lasted just a second, but Sonic stopped dead in his walk. "I felt it, too."

Knuckles turned around. "What?"

"The field," Sonic clarified. "I felt it. It was just a second. It was almost as if I'd touched an Emerald. It's gone now again."

The echidna regarded him thoughtfully. "I think you felt the pulse it just made."

"You felt it too?"

Knuckles nodded, looking strained. "Yeah. Spooky, isn't it?"

Sonic grimaced and nodded back at him. "You can really say that." He shook himself and fought to return his attention to the surroundings. "Hey, what's that stuff?"

At the other side of the large round room, several things that looked like giant glass containers stood around, from all Sonic could tell empty and without visible purpose. He walked closer.

"What do you think these are? I mean, you don't exactly need an aquarium in an underwater building, right? … Or, seven aquariums," he corrected himself after a second.

Knuckles had walked all the way up to the weird glass containers as well, staring at them as if they were toxic. "Sonic…?"

"Yeah?"

"I think… there was chaos energy in these things."

Sonic blinked. "Chaos energy. In these aquarium thingies?"

Knuckles nodded. "Yes." His voice shook a little as he said it, a barely concealed quiver of uncertainty, or worry, perhaps of fear? Then he reached out a hand and traced his fingertips along the glass, but quickly withdrew his hand and stared at his glove as if there was a mark on it you could actually see.

"You sure?", Sonic dared to ask. Instead of an answer, Knuckles suddenly grabbed his arm and before the hedgehog knew what was happening, the echidna had pressed his palm flat against the glass. A jolt like electricity ran up Sonic's arm and his quills stood on end instantly. "Whoa!"

Knuckles let go of him. "Want to rethink your question?"

Sonic stared at his hand. It still tingled even after letting go of the glass. He just shook his head, unable to answer, neck still prickling.

Knuckles' eyes trailed over the glass tanks. "I don't know what they did with these things, but if they were really full of that much chaos energy… we got a huge problem on our hands, Sonic."

Numbly the hedgehog looked at him, finally dropping his hand to his side. "I'm afraid you're right."

Knuckles pointed at the next door. "Quick. We need to know what Metal Sonic did. If you believe in anything at all, pray to it we're not to late."

Sonic gulped. Something about that look in Knuckles' suddenly haunted eyes was giving him the creeps.